Google Ads vs. Marchex

Google Ads is a useful advertising tool to build brand exposure and generate lead volumes for your chosen product. Whilst it can be costly at times due to competitor bidding strategies and requires constant monitoring to ensure campaigns perform as expected, it typically provides the desired quality and quantity of leads for custom budgets.

Incentivized

The Marchex platform is suitable for you to draw conclusions on how to approach your users. It also helps you with conversational improvements and data analysis. I recommend if you already have a large user base who buy your service and are always asking for explanations to hire Marchex for sure

Incentivized

• Automated targeting via Smart Shopping campaign. It's one of the best campaign types in Google Ads. In the beginning, you may see lower revenue and ROAS, but once you give some meaningful time to your campaign, it is most likely to perform well.
• Smart bidding strategies: Google Ads has developed some really great bidding strategies such as maximizing conversion and maximizing conversion with ROAS settings. Based on one's requirement and their goal with revenue and target ROAS, they can choose the appropriate bidding strategy.
• Reporting: A business owner and advertising must know about their audiences, how their campaigns have been performing, what's working and what's not, and for that reason, powerful, effective reporting is needed, and Google Ads provides rich details reporting that covers almost every aspect of a business.

Incentivized

• Marchex does exactly what you need it to do. It allows businesses to quickly and effectively create online and offline call-tracking numbers to measure marketing performance.
• Marchex offers a variety of additional options, features, and capabilities outside of their core business model, which is call tracking. These business offerings appeal to smaller businesses, since they are primarily an enterprise-level call-tracking platform.
• Marchex allows you to listen and mark phone calls based on whether or not they lead to a conversion, if you business has the time to manage this process, it is an effective way to determine which source/mediums are providing the highest inside-conversion rate.

Incentivized

• If you don't know what you're doing, it will be a costly mistake. You need to target ads, and it is difficult the first time to do that.
• There isn't a feature to run an add for a couple set date spans, just hours you want to run them or a single date span.

Incentivized

• Although customer support is only a phone call away, trouble shooting was not their strongest area. There was usually only one person who could help with technical support and getting past the gate keepers to talk to that person was not easy.
• Salesmen were difficult to get in touch with. You think it would be easy to negotiate a contract to add more services but this proved to be a difficult task as well.
• Online reporting could use improvement. If you wanted to sift through data you had to download a spreadsheet to manipulate the data. Very little beyond simple reporting could be accomplished on their platform.

Incentivized

I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.

Incentivized

We renew Marchex each year, we love it! It's a great investment. It's woven into a few of our products that we offer our clients so we wouldn't stop using it any time soon. The clients are big fans of it

This is more of a subjective rating, because I think it can be increased with how much our ad spend is. The more of an ad spend, the more visibility we can get, and therefore all features can climb. With an overall larger presence the usability is that where we can get messages out quick, and that's the main thing we try to do with our campaigns.

Incentivized

We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with

Incentivized

Daily use with advanced account structures. Familiarity with reporting/api and complex setups.

Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.

Incentivized

I love how easy it is to listen to calls, filter and export reports for clients. Super happy with the services that are provided for me!

Incentivized

• Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
• Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
• If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.

Incentivized

• Quick and easy distribution of phone numbers with city specific area codes
• Easy to set up after business hours and alternative forwarding numbers
• It has been very helpful in showing clients how their staff answers the phone and where there is opportunity for more training

Incentivized